Invision Power Services dropping IP.Nexus?
By Adam Kinder on Jun 22, 2008 in
I worked for IPS from June 2005 to June 2006. The information in this post is lazy-day Sunday speculation, and contains 0 inside information that I may have been privy to back in ‘05
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IPS recently published an announcement over on their company blog, announcing that IP.Nexus development was being suspended, and all development resources shifted into the next IP.Board + Component release.
For the unaware, IP.Nexus is a customer relations product, built in a modular fashion with extra components. One could buy the Nexus core, the ticket system module, the hosting module, etc, and have a full platform.
The product was started in Winter 2004, alongside IP Dynamic, which was a content management system. Last year, IPS merged the two products into one, giving Nexus a nice enterprise CMS module.
Nexus itself has changed a lot over the years, new interface, new features, and growing excitement. The last Nexus beta was seven, and the product has a ton of bug fixes & topics in it’s forum.
Knowing that, it’s understandable why IPS customers are a bit miffed about the announcement. Suspending development and shifting resources is one thing, but to hang Nexus’ future on the line “While we will evaluate the position of IP.Nexus in the marketplace at a later date…” is another.
Keep in mind that this is arm-chair speculation. No one at IPS knows the company’s revenue aside from management. I didn’t know it, didn’t ask, and other staffers have pointed out in the forum that they don’t know the cash position of the company. Being a privately held company, it’s no one’s business other than the owners. That said, at E29, our balance sheet is available to everyone in the company that isn’t a contractor. At Citizant, the company’s finances are on a board, mapped month by month against budget, for everyone to see.
But, moving on, this sends a signal to the market, and to competitors, that the business may be cash strapped. Allocating resources away from a prototype product back to one that is already generating revenue isn’t a bad idea at all, it just has the appearance that Nexus development was taking too long, and costing too much to sustain, and had to be dropped until the company can improve it’s financial health and hire on additional resources.
Coupled with the fact that it’s been nearly four years since development started, it doesn’t bode well for Nexus’ future. I gotta say, while I haven’t used any of the current betas, I’ve seen the videos and screens, and it looked pretty damn stable and awesome to me. As a competitor however, the announcement did stir up some of our clients and developers, leading to quite a few emails starting with “You guys should…”, “We should…”, “How feasible would it be…”.
My answer to that? Dunno, it would be pure speculation at this point 
Maybe it’s more of “We started recoding IPSClass (and other things) for IPB3 and realized how hacked together Nexus was. To recode it using the improvements we’ve already finished for IPB would take far too long. We’ll wait until IPB3 is out, and maybe try to piece it all in again.”
Dunno, I’ve heard some things about IP3 coming Q3, which seems like it could be very optimistic, and realizing such they needed to pump more effort into it?
Last I knew only three people were working on Nexus, and pretty sure them working on IPB kills Nexus dev, so it really may be as innocent as that. :/
Even if that is the case, still a pretty bad waste of money and resources to recode it, again, after the other recodes.
Q3 is pretty aggressive, we’ll see what happens
Won’t argue that.
I hate to say ‘hacked together’ because it’s not like VB by any means, but a lot things were just thrown in and meshed together as it grew. There’s a lack of incorporating extensibility as IPB grows…
I hope with IP3’s development it’s starting to ring through that’s the way to go.
I think you are probably right, there is a lot going on at IPS about “core” this and “singleton design” blah blah, they probably did realize that Nexus was a mess and needed a core overhaul like IPB3. The bad thing is, I think 90% of it is jumping on the latest shiny PHP practice for no reason other than reinventing the wheel.